Kruger YouTuber Becomes First South African to Reach 1 BILLION Views

Nadav Ossendryver, the young YouTuber from Glenhazel, who has taken wildlife spotting to a whole new level with his channel Latest Sightings – Kruger, has just become the first South African to receive over one BILLION views on his YouTube channel.

Without much fuss or fanfare, his Facebook Page yesterday posted a message saying: “So exciting to have just reached 1 Billion views on the Latest Sightings – Kruger YouTube channel! Making the channel in the top 3K most-viewed in the world.”

Nadav’s incredible story began in 2011 when at just 15 he founded Latest Sighting, an online, real-time, wildlife spotting service for visitors to the Kruger National Park. It was something that the then schoolboy personally wanted.

According to his website, he was an obsessive Kruger Park visitor whose favourite pastime was asking his parents to flag down passing motorists to ask them what they had seen. “Eventually they tired of this hobby and began to say no. Nadav looked to technology to solve his problem. He established Latest Sightings and from there it quite literally exploded!” says the site.

Using social media platforms and by creating an Android app to inform people all over the world on what the animals and birds were doing, he gathered an audience. During the first couple of years he only had a few hundred subscribers but he was passionate about what he was doing and persevered.

“My motivation for starting on YouTube was the fact that we were getting lots of amazing sightings. The best place to share photos was Instagram, so we shared the best of the best there. The best place to share videos was YouTube, so we started our YouTube channel,” he told Gadget.co.za in an interview this week.

The rest is history.

Nadav was crowned South Africa’s Social Media Star of 2014 with the most successful SA YouTube channel.

In 2016, at the age of 19, he became the youngest South African included on Forbes Africa’s Most Promising Entrepreneurs Under the Age of 30 list.

At the time his Kruger Sightings YouTube Channel was the most watched South African channel, with over 315 million views. Three years later and it’s over 1 billion!

In December 2018, Nadav received a Gold Play Button for hitting one million subscribers on YouTube.

Today Kruger Sightings has 1.44 million subscribers.

In the interview with Gadget, Nadav revealed that the company is currently expanding to start to establish communities in various other reserves.

WATCH VIDEO from the early days: Joburg Today Speaks About Nadav Ossendryver and Latest Sightings (Feb 2015)

WATCH ONE OF KRUGER’S SIGHTINGS’ RECENT VIDEOS:

Here’s a video added in August which has already received over 1.5 million views. Kruger Sightings says: “Amazing sighting of a kudu and lion taking each other head-on. Video submitted by Liana & Zander Bierman and Nicole Tobias.”

Screenshot of the amazing accomplishment by Latest Sightings – Kruger

https://www.facebook.com/latestsightingskruger/photos/a.220668441336826/3137858236284484/